The Gods Help Those Read online

  “Yes, sir. Please.”

  Tacitus and I stepped back while Thalia gave Clymene a few more spoonfuls of soup. “Thank you,” she said. “That tastes good.” She laid her head back.

  “Just a couple of more questions,” I said. “Then we’ll let you rest. Why were you trying to get back to Spain?”

  “Nothing was going right, sir. The fullers’ guild was demanding that my uncle pay more in dues because he had more people working with him. We had arguments with the guild leaders. My father was accustomed to running his own business without that sort of interference. We argued with my uncle. And Rome is such a big, ugly place. My father and my brothers finally decided they couldn’t take it anymore. We all just wanted to go home. But with the rain and the river overflowing, we couldn’t find a ship.”

  “The sailing season is about over,” I said. “I doubt you’ll find a ship sailing as far as Spain until next spring.”

  Clymene moaned. “We tried to stay near the river, just in case we could find a boat. Then, a few days ago, we were robbed.”

  “Could you tell anything about the men who robbed you?”

  “No, sir. It was dark and raining hard. They were on us before we knew what was happening. After that, all we wanted was someplace that was dry so we could figure what to do. Maybe a place to die. The door to your warehouse was unlocked.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t ‘unlock’ it?” Tacitus asked.

  Clymene tried to raise her hand. “No, sir. I swear it. We were trying doors on several buildings and yours was the only one that wasn’t locked. It seemed like a gift from the gods. At least we could get out of that accursed rain.”

  “Was the man with the stripe on his tunic someone you knew?”

  “No, sir. We didn’t realize he was there until the next morning. It was dark as the inside of a cave. We were so tired we just fell asleep. I could hardly stop shivering from being cold and wet. It wasn’t until daylight that we saw that man on the other side of the building.”

  “What did you do when you saw him?”

  “My father called to him, said we meant no harm. But he didn’t move or say anything back. My father told my brothers to stay with his wife and me and he went over to the man. But he still didn’t move. My father touched him and the man slumped over a little bit, but he didn’t say anything. My father came back to us and said the man was dead.”

  “What did you do then?” I asked.

  “My father wanted to dump him in the Tiber rather than give up the only dry place we‘d been able to find. He said, if anyone found us there with him, they’d accuse us of killing him.” She coughed. “My brothers refused to touch him. They said we should just leave.”

  “Did you move him or take anything from him?” Tacitus asked.

  “No, sir. Not after that first time my father touched him and realized he was dead. We were still trying to convince my father that we should leave, but the building collapsed on us before we could get out.”

  I patted her arm. “We’ll let you rest now.”

  “What are you going to do with me, sir?”

  “We’ll worry about that when you’re feeling better.”

  When we were out of sight of her door Tacitus said, “You don’t believe her, do you?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You don’t do a very good job of hiding what you’re feeling, Gaius.”

  “Aurora tells me the same thing. No, I don’t believe her. It’s a very convoluted story, and she obviously isn’t related to any of those people. Remember, they were all Eastern-looking, especially the one she calls her father. She’s as Roman as you or I.”

  “But why would she be lying?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure she is.”

  I held Joshua up to my shoulder, with my left arm under his tiny bottom and my right hand on his back supporting his head. After a long time at the wet nurse’s breasts he seemed satisfied and content to sleep. In Hebrew, Naomi had explained to the nurse that, according to Gaius’ order, I was to be in charge of caring for the baby, with whatever assistance I needed from the other women.

  “I’ll be glad to have the help,” I said softly to him, “and you’ll be glad of it, too, because I don’t know anything about taking care of a baby. I would be more comfortable if you were a horse.”

  I had settled on the bench in Gaius’ arbor, the quietest, most secluded place in the garden. Admittedly it was brazen of me to take that seat, but I had seen Gaius and Tacitus go into the room where the injured woman was waking up. I was tempted to follow them and listen to what was said, but that would have meant leaving Joshua with the other women, and I wasn’t sure when I would get him back. Since Gaius had put me in charge of him, I wanted to assert myself right away. I was enjoying every sensation—his little body pressed to mine, his breath on my neck. I could have sat there for the rest of the day. I hadn’t given him life, but I had saved his life. To that extent, he was mine.

  Now Gaius and Tacitus came out of the woman’s room, talked for a moment, and Tacitus handed Gaius a scroll. They clasped hands, and Tacitus summoned his servants and headed for the door. Gaius looked around until he saw me, then turned in my direction. As he drew nearer I prepared to stand, even though it might mean waking Joshua, but he motioned for me to remain seated. I was quite surprised when he sat down beside me, laying the scroll in his lap.

  I slid over to make more room for him on the bench. “Forgive my impertinence,” I said softly. “I know this is your—”

  “What impertinence?” He kept his voice down, too. “This is the best place in this entire garden to sit with a sleeping baby. You’re just doing what I asked you to do.”

  We sat without saying anything for a few moments. I couldn’t help but feel that this was what it would be like to be his wife. We could sit here, holding our first child. He might even put his arm around me, not worrying about who would see us.…

  I shook my head. I had to stop thinking like that. “What is that?” I asked.

  Gaius unrolled the scroll. “It’s a record of what Josephus told Tacitus about Berenice and her family. It’s a complicated story. When I have time I’ll sit down and puzzle it out. I’m hoping there might be a clue in here about who would want to kill Julius Berenicianus. For that matter, if we could just figure out what he was doing in Rome, in my warehouse, it might be a step toward a solution.”

  “What if he was the random victim of some thug or gang of thugs on the street? He was in a very dangerous part of Rome, you know.”

  “Then we’ll probably never know who killed him. But we have to find out why he was in that area. I can’t believe it was a random killing, not with the coins stuffed in his mouth.”

  “And why did he have a baby with him?”

  “I’m not convinced he brought the baby. And I don’t think he was killed in my warehouse.”

  “You could be right. There was no blood.”

  “At least not in the part of the building we saw before it fell into the Tiber.”

  “So you think he was killed somewhere else?”

  Gaius nodded. “I do. Considering his wounds, there must have been a lot of blood.”

  “But why would someone put his body in your warehouse?”

  “Either because it was the only unlocked door they could find or because they wanted to implicate me in the crime.”

  “And why was Joshua there?” I patted the baby’s back as he stirred slightly, gave a sigh, and settled back down. “Did that woman’s story tell you anything?”

  Gaius shook his head. “Not much. If what she said is true, there’s no connection between her and the people she calls her family and Berenicianus. Apparently they just happened to end up in the same place because the door wasn’t locked.”

  “But that sounds like a coincidence, and I know how you feel about coincidences.”

  Gaius grimaced. “For the first time, I may have to accept one. What I really don’t understand is how the baby got there a
nd why he was hidden away from everyone else. Because of the circumcision I have to think there’s some connection between Berenicianus and…Joshua. But, if Berenicianus was in fact killed somewhere else, who brought this child into the warehouse?”

  “Oh, that reminds me. When I stopped Merione from leaving, I accused her of taking the baby to Regulus. She said I was wrong. Regulus had no interest in him.”

  Gaius gave me a disappointed, almost accusatory, look. “I wish you had told me that before I took her back to Regulus. She said something of the same sort to me. If I had known she said it to you, too, I certainly would have questioned her more closely to see what she meant.”

  “I’m sorry, Gaius. Things were happening so fast and I was so distraught that I completely forgot what she’d said.”

  Gaius placed a hand on my leg, a gesture no one else could see. “It’s all right. I know you were very upset.” He patted Joshua again.

  “Wouldn’t you like to hold him?” One of the hardest things I had to learn about Latin is that questions can be asked in different ways, depending on the answer one expects. The way I phrased my question meant that I was telling Gaius to answer “yes.”

  “Ah, well, yes, I suppose so. Aren’t you afraid he’ll wake up?”

  “His tummy is full. I expect him to sleep for quite a while. Naomi says that’s mostly what babies do at this age as long as they’re not hungry. Here, take him.”

  Joshua made no protest as I handed him over to Gaius, who held him out away from him at arm’s length, as though he was holding a dangerous animal.

  I suppressed a laugh. “Have you ever held a baby?”

  “No, actually, I haven’t. That’s women’s work. As Xenophon said in the Oeconomicus, the gods gave a greater share of concern for children to women than to men.”

  “But you don’t believe in the gods,” I said.

  “Well, no—”

  “Here. Hold him like this.” I positioned Joshua against Gaius’ chest and placed Gaius’ hands under the baby and behind his head. Joshua’s little hand reached up and came to rest on Gaius’ chin.

  “Don’t you feel a kind of warmth between you and him?”

  “I think that’s because he just pissed on me.” He handed the baby back to me.

  I rearranged the cloth Joshua was wrapped in so that he settled in a dry spot. “I wonder if Merione was taking him so Regulus could pass him along to someone, or was she going to take him directly to someone else?”

  Gaius reached over and patted Joshua’s back and grew serious. “Regulus did show some concern about the baby’s welfare, and the captain of the vigiles took Berenicianus’ signet ring to him. Regulus clearly has some interest in this business, but I don’t know what.”

  “Could Regulus have had Berenicianus killed? Maybe the captain took the ring as proof that the job had been done.”

  “I find that easy to believe,” Gaius said with a snort. “But why? And where? Why would he have stuffed the coins in his mouth? None of this makes any sense.”

  “We need to start over,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s go back to your warehouse, or what’s left of it. We didn’t have a chance to examine it as thoroughly as we should have. There was so much confusion.”

  Gaius nodded. “Berenicianus must have been killed somewhere in that area. No one would have carried a dead body any considerable distance in that weather. If we’re going to start over, the first thing I want to know is where he was killed.”

  I came out of my room wearing a clean, dry tunic and dropped the piss-stained one in a basket for the servants to launder. Across the garden, outside my mother’s room, I saw Aurora handing Joshua over to Naomi and the Hebrew nurse. Even though it was her idea, I hadn’t been sure if she would go with me back to the warehouse or if the lure of Joshua would keep her here. But she seemed to trust those women enough to leave the baby in their care. And her curiosity about an investigation can be as strong as my own.

  “Are you going to send for Tacitus?” she asked as we left, with four slaves to accompany us. I had especially picked Archidamos, the largest and strongest of my servants, partly for protection and partly because we might need to move some of the debris from the building. Like most men of my class, I don’t have a lot of male servants in my familia urbana, probably one male for every ten women. The men are needed to work on my rural estates, not to be sniffing around the women in the household. Some men of my class, I’m sorry to say, treat their household of female servants as a harem, like the ancient Persian kings one reads about in Herodotus.

  “He and Julia are having guests for dinner,” I said, switching to Greek since I knew none of these servants—not even the Greek-named Archidamos—could speak it. “Some friends of hers. I think he’ll be too busy to poke around in ruins with us.”

  Aurora laughed and made the change to Greek, which would allow her to drop the “my lord” that she was sometimes careless about in Latin. “Oh, I suspect he would choose our company over Julia’s friends any day.”

  “At one time you might have been right, but I think his attitude is different now.” Julia is a year younger than Aurora. Tacitus married her when she was thirteen. When I first met him, on our way home from provincial service in Syria six years ago, he complained about her vapidness, even after a couple of years of marriage. Now she has grown up, and the miscarriage she suffered two years ago seems to have made her more thoughtful and mature. Aurora’s injury and miscarriage last summer has created a bond between the two women that overcomes any distance their social status might otherwise impose.

  “Besides,” I said, “I don’t think she’ll give him any choice today. One of the guests, he told me, is another Julia.”

  “Oh, there are only a couple of thousand of those in Rome.”

  “Another…particular Julia.”

  Aurora considered that for a moment. “Titus’ daughter?”

  “None other. Domitian’s niece. Oh, and by the way, his mistress.”

  “Well, I can’t wait to hear Tacitus’ account of that dinner.”

  “If he has any sense, it will be a very circumspect tale.”

  It was a relief to walk without rain drenching us. Because it was early afternoon, there weren’t many people in the streets. Some probably were resting before going to the baths. Shops were closed. The streets of Rome are never quiet—not even at night—but at this time of day they can almost be called calm. We reached the river bank in about a quarter of an hour. The servants who were with me gasped when they saw the ruins of the warehouse.

  “I had heard it was damaged, my lord,” Archidamos said as we surveyed the exterior, “but ‘destroyed’ is a more accurate word. Are you going to try to rebuild?”

  It was time to revert to Latin. “I don’t think that will be possible. Even if I level what’s left, the river bank has been eaten away so badly that I couldn’t put up a building of any decent size. I hope I can sell the property to someone on either side of me. They’d be able to expand their buildings, and I could recoup a portion of what I’ve lost.”

  “That would mean selling to Regulus…my lord,” Aurora said. She added the honorific with an extra breath, almost too late. I’ve told her often that, whatever our relationship, she must observe the proprieties in front of others. Maintaining discipline and respect among one’s servants is crucial. If one servant violates a rule in front of the others and is not reprimanded, a man risks losing control of his entire household.

  “Yes, I would hate to sell to Regulus, but he might be my only option.”

  “If he realizes that, my lord, I’m sure he’ll insist on beating the price down.”

  “Whatever I lose will just have to be an investment in gaining my mother-in-law’s good will.”

  As we talked I surveyed the small paved lane between my building and the one to the north of it. The lane was on my property.

  “Are you looking for something in particular, my lord?” Archidamos
asked from behind me.

  “Yes, for blood.”

  Archidamos wrinkled his nose as though he smelled some. “Blood, my lord?”

  “As I’m sure you know, there was a man found inside who had been stabbed.”

  “And had his mouth jammed full of coins, didn’t he, my lord, and his lips sewed shut?”

  I nodded and sighed. Those sensational details had probably been noised all over Rome by now. “Right now I’m concerned about the stab wounds. There was no bloodshed around his body. He must have been killed somewhere else, and I think not far away.”

  “Wouldn’t the rain have washed away any blood by now, my lord?”

  “You’d be surprised how stubborn blood can be,” I said. “You think you’ve cleaned it up, but it gets into cracks and corners and you don’t notice it unless you look very closely.” I knelt near the base of the wall of my building. Even in daylight the shadows made it difficult to see every detail. “Someone bring me a lamp. There should be some right inside the door.”

  Aurora retrieved a lamp, lit it, and handed it to me. “You look like Diogenes,” she said with a laugh.

  To cover her omission of the honorific I quickly said to the other servants, “Diogenes was a Cynic philosopher from several hundred years ago. He once walked through the streets of Athens at midday holding a lamp. When someone asked him what he was looking for, he said, ‘An honest man.’ ”

  Archidamos furrowed his brow. His primary asset is his brawn, not his brain.

  “He meant an honest man was so difficult to find,” I said, “that you need extra light, even in the middle of the day.”

  “Oh, I see, my lord.” He offered a perfunctory chuckle.

  “And blood is hard enough to spot that you need some extra light.” I pointed to a rusty brown spot right at the base of the wall. “But there it is.”

  Between the paving stones and the wall of my building ran a narrow strip of dirt and grass, the width of my thumb from the knuckle to the tip. The blood had soaked into the dirt but was still visible on the blades of grass.